Tag Archives: virginity

“This very limited definition of sex prevents people from recognizing lesbian sex as real sex. At best, what lesbians do is foreplay that can never reach completion on its own. Or, it is a turn-on for straight men and a staple of heterosexual pornography. A scene of two women kissing—increasingly common on mainstream television in shows such asGossip Girl and Community—is often used to add titillation to an otherwise mundane plot. As long as the women involved are conventionally pretty and feminine, this lesbianism is safe and sexy for prime-time viewing. (Butch women, by contrast, are often seen as erotic turn-offs: unsexy imitations of real men.) In each of these scenarios, lesbian sex is something women do while they are waiting for a man to come along. The straight male viewer, the target audience for ‘lesbian’ pornography, is invited to imagine himself into the scene, as the one who can complete the picture and turn the warm-up act into the real deal.”

“The idea of your first penis-in-vagina sexual encounter being something significant and life altering (well, for women anyway) has origins in women being considered property.

That is to say, virginity is a social construction that came about because of the commodification of women.

Since women were (and sometimes still are) considered property, when they got married, they were passed on to their husbands from their fathers. You know the whole father-walks-his-daughter-down-the-aisle tradition? Well, it represents a transfer of property from her father to her husband. Her father was literally giving her away.”

“Participating in hookup culture doesn’t mean we’ve been deluded into thinking of our own exploitation as sexual freedom. It means we’re thinking critically about what we want instead of plunging straight into the relationships women are repeatedly told — by Taylor, by Friedersdorf, by society — we should desire for ourselves. And that’s what makes it so hard for Taylor, Rosin, and others to accept that we might be participating in hookup culture voluntarily, not to make time for resume padding: we want something different for ourselves than what our parents’ generation wants for us.”

Fifteen years ago, the very first question Carrie Bradshaw “couldn’t help but wonder” was simple, provocative, and in its own way, progressive: Can women have sex like men? That query was questionably relevant even a decade and a half ago, when Sex and the City sought to answer it for 30-something urban professionals. Unbelievably enough, we’re still having that conversation, except writers have turned their sights from themselves and their peers to a different group entirely: college-aged women. “Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too,” Kate Taylor’s lengthy study of Penn undergrads for TheNew York Times’ Styles section, isn’t the first subtly judgmental, distressingly inaccurate portrait of the supposedly post-feminist, post-relationship college dating scene. Sadly, it probably won’t be the last. But the practice of telling college-aged women how we should lead our romantic lives is patronizing, condescending, and — above all — needs to stop.